Conventional cutter molds can be divided into two categories; one such as plastic laser cutter mold, line cut cutter mold or plastic cutter mold is formed by way of a wooden, plastic or steel plates being planted with blades and called as traditional cutter mold and the other one is called etched cutter mold, which is made by way of a metal plate being etched to form a cutter body and the blade being formed with CNC milling machine or grinding machine.
Although the traditional cutter mold provides blades with consistent quality and wider blades being chosen in case of cutting thicker material with longer life span, the bent angle for each of the blades is limited so that the fabrication cost and accuracy of distances and angles between the cutting lines are limited too.
Contrarily, the etched cutter is advantageous in fabrication cost and configuration change and it is a good associated part in a rolling type continuous mold in spite of thicker material being unable to be cut with the etched cutter.
The etched cutter mold is made by way of a popularly used etching technique. Referring to FIG. 3, a metal plate is printed on the surface thereof with an ink layer 30 and the surface provides an ink layer zone and a blank zone. The metal plate is soaked in etching liquid after the ink layer has dried and the blank zone is etched with the etching liquid. Then, the ink is removed from the blade parts 471, 472 of the front end of the cutter mold and are grinded with a grinder, a milling machine or a lathe to allow the cutter body 43 providing a shape of an approximate equilateral triangle and being upright from a base 40 with a sharp point 46 constituted by the metal plate.
The ink print of the conventional etching for making cutter mold has a physical limitation. Too thick of ink provides less fluidity and inconsistent viscosity and a problem frequently met is that both sides of the contour have wavy and zigzag shapes and, even more, disconnected lines are created to degrade the effect of etching. Too thin of ink provides insufficient obstruction and it is incapable of forming the cutter body. Hence, it is very hard for the conventional etching way to create delicate and homogenous ink lines. The only way that can be done with the conventional method is that thick contour ink lines are printed for making a cutter mold blank and a computer program adapted to a grinding machine is designed to comply with a specific shape of the desired shape of the cutter mold. Hence, the grinding machine performs to work the cutter mold blank and remove two extremely wide lateral blade parts 471, 472 for forming the blade of the cutter mold.
As the foregoing, all the conventional etching molds have to be completed with the process of grinding and cutting and distance B between cutter body edge lines is often limited by size of the grinding tool head and it results in the configuration of the cutter mold and thickness of the contour lines of the cutter mold are subjected to many restrictions. Especially, how to deal with the problems related to equipment and technique is a difficult subject and that is why the fabrication cost is kept high. These are reasons of the conventional method for making the cutter mold incapable of being popularly utilized.
In addition, the cutter mold has been becoming a required tool gradually for a technical work piece made at home or personal working room with fast speed, accuracy and desired configuration. For instance, a suitable cutter mold is needed while cards, dolls, posters or advertisement are made. If each cutter mold has to be grinded with a grinding machine and the grinding machine only can reach certain ranges of sizes. Further, in order to maintain the grinding machine in good condition, it is necessary to perform maintenance periodically. However, the conventional technique for making the cutter mold is obviously unable to meet the needs of the current market.